The Role Of Local Governments In Transition Economies And Its Evolution Mechanism Study

With the acceleration of the economic globalization, the breaking up of trade barriers, the advance of the fluidness of resource and the persons with ability, the age of global competition between governments is coming. It is the key factor for a country or region to gain competitive advantage whether government is able to make a good environment to attract capital, technology and talents. Therefore government is becoming the focus that attracts the attention all over the world.In China, with the development of reform, many deep contradictions and problems are more and more tightly interwoven with the government. It determines whether a good market economic system or a bad one will come to being in China how the government orientates its role in economy and how it reforms itself. In this background, after absorbing the thoughts from government theory, liberal theory , interventional theory, market-enhancing theory, governance theory and institutional economics, with the empirical observation on the county-level governments in Zhejiang province , this dissertation makes efforts to explore the principle on how government in transition determines its role and the mechanism of government's role forming and changing and how to facilitate government to change its role.To be specific, four basic problems are focused in this dissertation: (1) What role should government in transition economy play? (2) What role government plays in fact? (3) Why government plays this kind of role? What are the determining factors of government's role? What is the mechanism of government's role forming and changing? (4) How to reform government to facilitate the its role to change?By integrating the normative and empirical analysis, this dissertation tries to answers these problems comprehensively and deeply. The following four parts are the main work of this dissertation.(1) To answer what role government should play, considering current studies pay little attention on what government is and whether government will act on the expectation of society , this dissertation firstly explores the nature of government from the viewpoint of political philosophy, and points out that government is a monopolistic organization of violence in society, whose coming out and continued existence have a deep logic of collective action .As a result of the reason and self-interest of the bandits and demos, government has a natural tendency to infringe upon the rights and liberties of people. However, government is necessary .So it is necessary evil. We should restrict its role in public sector to avoid its infringing on people's freedom and rights. We should construct our government basing on these values such as "justice, equality, freedom, democracy " and the principle of reason. Secondly, this dissertation lays open the precondition of economic theories that guide government to determine its role. Liberal theory emphasizes the role of free market. Its precondition is that market has come to being. While in transition economy, many places, especially lagged countryside, are not integrated into national market system, where government is faced with anther problem-how to make the people integrated in market system. The precondition of interventionism is that society (including government) is ruled of law. While transition economy is still not ruledfully of law. So government in transition is likely to abuse the power we give to make it intervene the economy. Therefore, we advocate government to solve the problem of market mechanism by enhancing the coordination of market with less directly intervening market. In fact, the nature of the development of regional economy is the enhancing of personal ability and social capital. Therefore, local government in transition should facilitate economy development by enhancing regional personal capital and social capital. At last, on the basis of empirical analysis, this dissertation brings forward the principle for government to orientate its role: let the people be themselves and coordinate them justly.(2) During the descrip...